Boss's Secret

Victor Harrington was stirring a sugar cube into his fourth black coffee when he remembered the drafty garage where NovaTech had started five years earlier. The sugar dissolved slowly, the way snow that winter had melted under the tires of Jason’s motorcycle. Jason was the first engineer he’d hired—thirty-one, hands always marked with solder burns, who would set his helmet down on a server chassis and start debugging code without a word. Victor had stood in the garage doorway, cold air pouring in, and told Jason that once the company found its feet, there would be a piece of the option pool with his name on it. Jason had smiled, pointed a screwdriver at him, and said nothing. The black helmet was still there, on the top shelf of the company storage closet, under a layer of dust. Victor had last seen it while hunting for a spare ethernet cable; he hadn’t touched it, just closed the cupboard door.

The payroll email came from Karen in Finance. Forty-six, divorced, wore a muted rose lipstick, never added an emoji to a message. Victor opened the approval request; the attachment field was empty, the body only a single line: Kindly confirm the compensation adjustment schedule for this month. He stared at the screen for maybe fifteen seconds, then marked it as read. The inbox jumped back to the top, where Ross’s private club statement sat waiting. Victor stood up and walked to the restroom.

One of the fluorescent tubes in the hallway was flickering at a frequency that tightened something at the base of the skull. The restroom soap smelled falsely dense—citrus cut with too much alcohol. The moment Victor pushed the door open he heard someone talking inside the far stall, voice kept low, but the tiles threw every syllable back with sharp clarity. The man was asking a landlord for one more week, explaining that the orthodontist bill for his kid’s braces would definitely be paid next month; it didn’t sound like the first time he’d had to ask. Victor recognized the voice—Marcus from Quality Assurance, who had moved from Milwaukee three years ago and brought a tin of his wife’s cookies on his first day, wrapped neatly in foil.

Victor made no sound. He walked to the sink, turned on the hot tap, pumped two measures of soap, worked up a lather, rinsed, pulled two paper towels. The voice from the stall had stopped. Victor straightened his tie in the mirror; the Windsor knot was off-center by maybe two millimeters, and he nudged it back with his thumb. On his way out the door handle was still slick with leftover soap. He wiped his fingers against the seam of his trousers. Marcus never emerged from the stall.

NovaTech’s launch event was held in that white-walled gallery downtown, the one that had hosted a contemporary ceramics show and still had the empty wall-hooks to prove it. The product was copper-core cable, but Victor had the samples wrapped in parchment-colored tubes stamped Tuscan Atelier, and the promo film was shot by an independent director—tight close-ups of hands, slow-motion wood shavings curling, a cello on the soundtrack. The oxygen-content data was printed on page eight of the brochure, in a typeface two points smaller than the body text, the ink a pale gray. No one would reach page eight. Victor adjusted one of the tubes on the display table himself, thumbing away a speck of hot glue at the edge; the glue was still soft and left a small burning print on his fingertip. When the camera flashes went off, a heat surged up from his stomach. He swallowed it down, telling himself it was only the four cups of morning coffee churning.

The first major order came from search-engine bidding. NovaTech bought every keyword tied to premium cabling, custom cable, engineering-grade copper core, outbidding three established manufacturers. Victor knew perfectly well that if he didn’t, their pages would sink past the tenth screen of results, buried alongside the shops that actually used oxygen-free copper and had never bothered to hire a designer for their website. The day the orders flooded in, the server nearly crashed, sales opened champagne, and Victor, in his office, peeled two pills from a foil pack of stomach tablets and washed them down with the whiskey Ross had given him. Single malt, heavy peat, enough to smother the bitterness of the medicine.

Ross was a member of the Bunning Club on the west side of town. Victor had never asked the initiation fee, though he knew it was roughly three years of Marcus’s salary. The club’s cigar room had deep-green leather sofas and crystal ashtrays heavy enough to anchor a stack of paper. Ross taught Victor how to read the hidden receivables on a balance sheet, his signet ring tapping the table as his finger moved across the figures. That night, Ross slid a paper napkin across the table with his thumb. On it, only a date and a stock symbol, the handwriting hurried, the ink bleeding a little. Don’t short it, Ross said. Someone’s going to sweep the shares early. Victor folded the napkin along its crease and slipped it into the inside pocket of his jacket. Then he asked after Ross’s daughter’s sailing camp, his voice as casual as if they were discussing the weather. His stomach seized again; this time he couldn’t push it down. He excused himself to the restroom. The cigar-room door was thick, and once it closed, no laughter leaked through. Victor threw up in the club restroom, rinsed his mouth with cold water, and saw in the mirror a fine line at the corner of his eye that he’d never noticed before.

He got home at two in the morning. It was the third house he’d bought since moving out of the garage, the kitchen counters marble, cold to the touch in winter like pressing a palm against ice. Victor opened the fridge for a soda water and saw that the takeout menu pinned under a magnet on the door was crooked. He couldn’t remember when he’d put it there, or the last year he’d ordered in. He reached out and straightened the magnet; it clicked back against the metal, the sound loud in the empty kitchen. He stood in front of the open fridge for a long time, the chill spilling onto his knees, which ached faintly—an old football injury from high school. He thought about that semifinal game, the pass he’d thrown wide, the coach slamming his clipboard on the sideline. That was the first time he’d learned that even when you thought you’d given everything, reality could tell you it still wasn’t enough. The compressor hummed. He shut the fridge door without opening the soda water, left the can on the counter.

The charity dinner was in the Hilton ballroom. The crystal chandeliers had been polished too brightly, giving everyone’s foundation a faintly masklike cast. Victor stood by a high table with a glass of sparkling water, listening to a heavyset man in construction materials describe the vacation house he’d bought in Florida. He was just getting to the pool heating system when Victor saw a back. The man was carrying a tray of champagne, his spine held too straight, as if he were using it to brace against something pulling him down. It was Andrew. In college they’d worked the same pizza joint; Andrew’s eyes had been bright enough to set something on fire, and he was always saying he’d start his own software company one day. Now he was wearing a waiter’s white shirt, cuffs worn to a soft fringe, hair combed back so neatly that the one tuft sticking up at the crown looked like it had been pressed down by a pillow all day.

Victor’s gaze slid away on instinct. He turned back to the man in construction and asked a question about the pool heater’s energy draw, his tone so earnest that the man hesitated before replying. Andrew passed about three meters behind him; the champagne flutes clinked lightly on the tray, a brittle glass sound, but no liquid spilled—his hands were steady, as steady as if he’d been carrying trays for ten years.

The maître d’ was a small man with oiled hair and rimless glasses. He paused beside Victor and said, very quietly, “Don’t tip him, Mr. Harrington. He might think he actually has a chance.” Then he was gone, his leather soles making no sound on the carpet. The twenty-dollar bill Victor had been holding, already damp with sweat, went back into his pocket. Andrew never looked at him—maybe he hadn’t recognized him, maybe he had and chose not to turn. The champagne flutes were lined up in perfect rows on his tray, each poured to seven-tenths, bubbles racing upward from the bottom, like miniature versions of those search terms you keep bidding on, pushing up just so you won’t sink to the bottom.

Victor left early and sat in the car for a long time. A thin film of dust covered the dashboard. He wiped a stripe of it away with the foil backing of the stomach-tablet packet from the glovebox, exposing the black leather grain beneath. The glovebox also held a gas-station receipt, half a bottle of water, and a napkin folded into a square, the handwriting on it already blurring. Victor took the napkin out, looked at it, and put it back. He started the engine; the wipers jumped once, dragging dry across the windshield, rubber squealing over grit, the sound sharp in the empty underground garage. He switched them off, shifted into gear, and drove out—not toward the office, not toward home, just east along the main road, past the shopping center that had already closed, past the used-car lot glowing under cold white light, past the suburban houses where warm yellow night-lights still burned in the windows. Inside those houses, there were probably children who needed braces too, landlords to plead with, emails marked as read.

Eventually he pulled into a twenty-four-hour gas station. A small puddle of oil beside the pump shimmered with a rainbow sheen under the fluorescent lights. The coffee machine inside the convenience store was already shut down; only a vending machine for hot chocolate remained, a smiley face drawn onto one of its buttons in marker. Victor fed in two coins, the machine ground and hummed, and dispensed a paper cup with a crimped rim. The liquid inside was pale and tasted mostly like cocoa powder and too much water. The crooked rim sat against the curve of his lower lip; he took a sip and burned the roof of his mouth. The pain was specific, brief, real.

Across from the gas station was an empty lot, overgrown with weeds knee-high, all leaning the same way when the wind moved. Victor leaned against the car door and finished the hot chocolate. At the bottom of the cup, a layer of undissolved powder had settled. He crushed the cup, tossed it into the trash can, and the iron lid clanged shut, startling a crow from the telephone pole nearby. The crow beat its wings and vanished past the edge of the fluorescent light. The sky was still dark, but in the east a very thin gray-blue had begun to seep in—the same pale gray as page eight of the brochure, as the faint reflection on the maître d’s glasses, as the frayed white of Andrew’s cuffs that was almost invisible under the chandelier.

Victor got back into the car, shut the door, straightened his seat a fraction. The glovebox hadn’t closed completely; a corner of the napkin showed white. He didn’t reach over to shut it. He just turned the ignition. This time, the wipers didn’t misfire.